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Over the years, I’ve been asked almost every question under the sun when it comes to the lottery. People are just curious and I never hold that against them. Now, if you try to get some secret information from me or learn the ultimate secret to winning lotteries, you are liable to sorely disappointed.
As far as I know, there isn’t some all powerful secret, only a complicated system that has a whole mess of quirks and intricacies. Plus, if I had the some secret to winning the lottery, wouldn’t I have used it for myself by now?
One of the most popular questions outside of asking me to commit some kind of fraud is asking about other people who have done the same thing. There are hundreds of stories the enforcement guys have told me, and, at least, a dozen that I’ve been involved with myself, involving people trying to get one over on the system.
One of the most common frauds is making a losing ticket “look” like a winner. They do everything they can to change the numbers, sometimes they get inventive. They use everything from pen and ink to scanning the ticket at home with a scanner and trying to digitally change the loser to a winner.
The one thing they can’t change is the bar code. This is where every scam like this falls down because as soon as the retailer scans the ticket, the computer automatically knows that it’s not a winner. So what people will do is try and get the retailer to sight verify the ticket as a winner and punch it in. It’s ridiculous and I don’t understand why they do it cause the retailer gets hit with the loss, it’s so much easier to just scan it and go by what the computer says. There have been a few cases where the retailer employee was in on the scam and split the winnings with the fraudster, but they always get caught.
Sometimes it is the retailer that gets a little greedy and decides to cheat the consumer. Say a person comes in and asks the worker behind the counter to check to see if their ticket is a winner. The employee pretends to scan the ticket, gives them a sad face and tells them that their ticket didn’t win, better luck next time. They then ask if the customer wants them to toss the ticket for them. The customer always says yes. Once the customer leaves the employee scans the ticket to see if it was a winner. If so, jackpot! They claim the money. The easiest way to get around this and stop the fraud is to sign your name at the bottom of the ticket right away, that way if the ticket is given away the fraudster can’t do much with it.
In California, this has been a huge problem and they have set up stings all across the state to catch these folks. The authorities get tips on fraudulent activity and go undercover to see what happens. They hand out marked tickets so that when the retail employee comes in to claim the prize, they can be easily identified and arrested.
It gets more complicated from there. Where there’s money, there’s fraud. Some enterprising retailers print up thousands of draw game tickets and sell them for big money overseas on the internet. They can go for as much as a few dollars over face value to as much as 1000% markup depending on the credibility of the website and the stupidity of the mark. Luckily it’s easy to trace and most of these people end up going to prison too.